Hybrid Fuzzy-Based Method for Optimally Selecting Aircraft for Low-Cost Carriers Operating Medium-Haul Flights

The proliferation of Low-Cost Carriers (LCCs) is generating a new business paradigm in the air transport sector by promoting lower airfares. Those LCCs have to optimize both assets and services to reduce costs and be competitive, being critical for this purpose addressing optimally the selection of their aircraft fleet. Regarding this relevant issue, different researchers focused the problem on the most typical connections of the LCCs, point-to-point short-haul operations, but the selection of aircraft for medium-haul operations is still a gap in the literature. Therefore, this paper proposes to address the aircraft selection problem within the medium-haul framework by using a hybrid methodology that mixes the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to establish the contribution of the selection criteria and the performance evaluation of different alternatives, and the Fuzzy Sets Theory (FST) to cope with the inherent uncertainty related to the experts’ judgments evaluating the alternatives. Results analyze three different aircraft selection procedures (AHP, AHP-FST with centroid defuzzification and AHP-FST with bisector defuzzification), demonstrating different results depending on the way uncertainty is dealt with for each method.